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In an update posted on their Posterous page, TweetDeck have finally confirmed that TweetDeck for Android is being retired, along with TweetDeck AIR and TweetDeck for iPhone. By association, my TweakDeck application will also cease to function.

The move, which is being made as part of an effort to 'focus development efforts on our modern, web-based versions of TweetDeck' comes at a time when Twitter as an organisation are pushing users to their primary clients as much as possible, as well as doing their best to stifle third party clients by limiting the number of users they can support and switching to a more restrictive API.

In another move that cements their 'locked in' model, the web based TweetDeck application will cease to support Facebook integration.

TweetDeck have stated that over the next two months users of TweetDeck AIR, TweetDeck for Android and TweetDeck for iPhone may experience some outages with those apps before they are removed from their respective app stores in early May.

So how does this affect TweakDeck, my 'fixed up' TweetDeck client that has nearly half a million downloads in the Play Store? Unfortunately... it too is doomed. Firstly, switching from the TweetDeck credentials internally to my own development credentials is virtually impossible because the application uses XAuth for authentication, which is no longer available to developers. Secondly, it is based on API 1.0 and switching to API 1.1 would be a huge undertaking. Disappointing, but it's out of my hands unfortunately. :(

From the whole TweetDeck team, we’re excited about what the future holds. We hope you are too.

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Oh! This is bad news. I'm using Tweakdeck all the time. Really don't like the native Twitter app. Which other alternatives to Tweakdeck with the same features are available? And what are the pros and cons? Thanks.

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The thing Twe(et/ak)Deck does that I literally can't find another app that does, is actually continually updating 24/7 - as in, if you tell it to check a column every (say) three minutes, it will download and cache your tweets *every* three minutes, whatever else you're doing with your phone at the time.

All the vast range of other apps I've tried only seem to update when they're in the foreground, though they'll notify you in the background if you have new replies etc.

(It's particularly surprising to me how few apps even cache the tweets they have downloaded anyway - you'd think in a limited-download-allowance situation they'd want to cling to anything they'd already grabbed rather than redownloading all the tweets every time you load a List, for instance.)

I really value the knowledge that all the tweets since I last looked are already sitting there in TweakDeck waiting for me to look at, regardless of connectivity at the point when I actually want to look at them. If anyone can point me to another app that does this, I'll be very grateful.